Civil Emergencies - Business Continuity Advice

Business Continuity is good business sense!

What is Business Continuity and how do I do it? Business continuity is not something that only large businesses should think about. No matter what size your business is, how many people it employs, your business must be prepared, because any form of interruption has the potential to seriously affect, yours, and your employees' livelihoods.

Under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, business continuity has been made a core responsibility of the Council, both internally and through promotion to local business. Solihull Council has and continues to go through an extensive process surrounding its Business Continuity arrangements to ensure it continuities to function despite the adversities it could face.

Business Continuity is making sure that your business continues to survive - It is your business and your livelihood. A business can be affected by many different disruptions of varying scales, your ability to continue to operate and get back to a normal level of operation as quickly as possible is critical and the essence of Business Continuity.

Every organisation has several 0critical dependencies' and a loss or interruption to any one of these can detrimentally affect you; the issue may not be a Major Incident or Civil Emergency. What may be Critical or Major to you may not be to others or your competitors, an interruption can be a simple single event such as a loss of fridge or late/no delivery, or could be part of a complex chain of events. Have you considered these basic forms of disruption?

• IT failure,
• Simple loss of Water or Power failure,
• Flooding,
• Fire,
• Crime,
• Loss of communication,
• Being let down by a supplier,
• A key member of staff leaving or being ill,
• Loss of your primary building or store
• The list can be endless.